Perhaps this was not quite what it seemed. Not a celebration of the turn of the millennium, but a doomsday prediction that we would all be using candles after the millennium bug put an end to life as we know knew it.

Or there again, maybe it was a very early attempt at making a torch (flashlight) with a rating of 2000 candle power.

Logged

If brains were made of dynamite, I wouldn't have enough to blow my nose.

In the late 90's, people became aware of a potential issue with dates, in that if the year was written with two digits (99), then the new year (00) would have a couple of issues.

00 < 99, rather than being larger than the previous year.If one simply incremented the value for the year, 99+1 = 100, which could cause a number of unexpected errors when one is expecting a 2 digit date.Dates might be calculated by concatenating the strings 19+the 2 digit year, so the new year might read 1900, or 19100.

Anyway, so there was a huge effort to clean up the code.... so that programs would work properly on the new year. Many companies such as Microsoft released special Y2K patches.

Nonetheless, there were many people who were convinced that there would be a critical failure, such as a loss of major public utilities such as electricity. Oregon Health Sciences University rented a huge semi-truck generator and wired it into their electrical system as a precaution.

Of course, there were a number of other people who weren't convinced that power would be lost, but perhaps at most, utilities would have to do an extra run of their billing.

Of course, on January 1, 2000, there was not a single power outage anywhere in the world, but at least a few dates were written incorrectly.

So, it is my interpretation that the candle holder not only celebrates the new millennium, but also celebrates the millennium bug, and preparing for the predicted mass power failures.

Finally I've found another! I've been trying to figure out what I found for months- and here you have something quite similar- Mine is 25mm diameter, 140 mm length, no flutes, copper nail sticking out one end. I also found mine in the wild- specifically in the Angeles Forest just outside Los Angeles, miles from a paved road, just off a fire road and near an old abandoned civil defense platform. My first guess was that it was an arc light electrode, but it wasn't tapered on the end as you'd expect it to be. I think research also showed it wasn't the right size. I'd love to know if you've found anything more out about it Clifford.